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Article — 30 July 2014 — 3,731 words

Reflections on IWMW 2014

Adapted from posts originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. This month I attended the Institutional Web Management Workshop at Northumbria University. The conference, aimed mainly at university web managers, has been running for 18 years. The theme of this year was rebooting the web, after a participant at last […]

Article — 19 July 2011 — 17 words

WordPress Twitter Facebook?!

Technology — Web

When adding social media icons to a website, take care over the order in which they appear.

Article — 3 July 2011 — 817 words

First impressions of Google+

Technology

Google has never quite worked with social media. After buying Blogger, it never seemed to know what to do with it. Then there were the high-profile flops Google Buzz and Google Wave. It was tempting to think that the mighty Google had lost touch completely while Facebook and Twitter gain more ground all the time. […]

Article — 20 February 2009 — 1,090 words

Putting the social into social bookmarking

Technology

Recently, Twitter has very much gone mainstream (at least in the UK). Even for a while before that, Twitter has been becoming more than just a microblogging service. It is certainly about a lot more than the famous prompt, “What are you doing?”, suggests. Twitter is used by different people for a wide variety of […]

Article — 10 February 2009 — 882 words

Social ladder

Business — Personal — Technology

One of the problems with social networking sites is that not everyone is on the same one. Thankfully I don’t find myself having to login to MySpace any more. But I would drop Bebo at a moment’s notice if I could get away with it. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends — particularly those from […]

Article — 23 October 2008 — 1,540 words

Rumours of blogging’s death are exaggerated, but not greatly so

Media — Society — Technology

There’s been a lot of chat recently about whether blogging is dead, sparked by this article in Wired by Paul Boutin. It’s easy to scoff at the article, and the idea that blogging is dead is obviously nonsense. But I doubt the claim would have got so much attention if there wasn’t a bit of […]

Article — 13 November 2007 — 298 words

Blocking Beacon

Current affairs — Personal — Technology

I am usually a defender of Facebook. But this time I think they have overstepped the line and have introduced a ‘feature’ that makes me personally uncomfortable. From The Facebook Blog: Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share […]

Article — 12 September 2007 — 2,026 words

Shove your partial feeds up your RSS

Media — Technology

(Yes, every post I write about RSS must contain the hilarious “‘RSS’ sounds a little bit like ‘arse’” pun.) I have a request for those people who publish RSS feeds. Make them full feeds! I know there is a supposedly a debate about whether partial or full feeds work best. Well, that is not really […]

Article — 6 September 2007 — 740 words

Should I put my blogs on my CV?

Business — Personal — Technology

Here is something that I’ve been pondering about quite a bit recently. A few years ago it was all bad news for bloggers who have jobs. Getting sacked because of your blog stuck fear into so many that it the concept even spawned its own word: dooce. People who have been dooced are not in […]

Article — 22 August 2007 — 831 words

Facebook apps are revealing their potential

Society — Technology

My latest internet addiction is Scrabulous. Jeremy Bentham thought that humans wanted to maximise pleasure rather than pain. Goodness knows what he would have thought if he saw me inviting Facebook friends to play Scrabble against me. It has mostly been a demoralising affair. I hadn’t realised quite how rusty I was at Scrabble. I […]

Article — 18 August 2007 — 646 words

Why do those social bookmarking links exist?

Media — User experience — Web

There is a fixture of the modern web that I really don’t understand. And in terms of annoyance it is probably second only to Snap Preview. Millions of links to social bookmarking websites littering the bottom of every news article and blog post written. You know the ones. “Digg this!” “Send to del.icio.us!” “Pimp-me-do to […]

Article — 2 June 2007 — 995 words

…Other social networks are dead

Technology

I was explaining how, sitting here today, it is difficult to see why anyone would want to sign up to a social network that isn’t Facebook. While MySpace used to be the market leader, it was always far too annoying and buggy to remain on the radar for long. Every time I visit MySpace I just get […]